RDS Tops The List But Global Diversity Dominates World's Largest Oil And Gas Companies In 2019

Oil and gas firms comprise 9 of the top 50 ranked public companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list. The largest and most successful companies in the oil and gas business are a diverse mix from Europe, the United States, Asia and South America.
Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) tops the list with
ExxonMobil and
Chevron just behind it. But the next ten firms on the list reveal the truly global nature of the oil and gas industry in the twenty-first century.

The Global 2000 ranking is based on a composite score from equally-weighted measures of revenue, profits, assets and market value.

RDS again takes the top spot among oil and gas companies (and is ranked #9 out of all companies) even though it is transitioning away from exploration and production – the more traditional functions of an oil company – and instead focusing on downstream and alternativeenergy. RDS is also the top overall company based outside of China and the U.S.

ExxonMobil and Chevron are the next in the industry on the oil and gas list, and also #11 and #19 overall, respectively. While both RDS and ExxonMobil made over $20 billion in profit for the year, Chevron made almost $15 billion. After these three, the rest of the top 10 oil and gas firms include two from China (
PetroChina and
Sinopec), two from Russia (
Gazprom and
Rosneft), and one each from the U.K. (
BP), France (
Total) and Brazil (
Petrobras).

PetroChina and Sinopec (ranked #22 and #35 overall, respectively) stand out because they had very high sales revenue but relatively low profit. PetroChina has the fourth highest sales of any company in the world, and Sinopec has the second highest at $400 billion. However, their profits are only 80thand 59th, respectively. Both made profits of under $10 billion. This could be explained, in part, because their business is focused on downstream, so their refineries must purchase crude at prices that were higher in 2018 than they had been in several years. However, RDS and most of the other major international oil companies are also heavily weighted toward downstream, and RDS saw over $15 billion in profit on just more than $320 billion in revenue. The other explanation for the Chinese firms’ relatively low profits is that they employ too many people. PetroChina employed 476,000 and Sinopec employed 463,000. In comparison, RDC employed only 81,000.

The global nature of the oil and gas industry is made obvious by the Global 2000 list. 60 years ago the industry was dominated by U.S. and European firms that operated globally. Now major public oil and gas businesses are based across Asia and South America as well, even in countries without significant oil and gas reserves of their own. In addition to China, India is the home of
Reliance Industries, a major refiner and #71 on the list overall. Thailand’s
PTT PCL is ranked 17thin the industry and #165 overall.

Noticeably, the Middle-Eastern oil and gas firms are absent, because the national oil companies in those countries have not gone public. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) in the United Arab Emirates spun off and listed publicly a small part of its business in 2017, but the rest of the company is still wholly owned by the government. Of course, Saudi Aramco has been teasing an IPO since 2016, and if it does so it will almost surely top the overall list with a profit in excess of $100 billion.

Ellen R. Wald, Ph.D. is a historian and consultant on energy and geopolitics. She is the author of Saudi, Inc., president of Transversal Consulting & a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.